Alpine Security Fix Tracker

This is a Flask web application which tracks security fixes in Alpine.

By using the Alpine secdb, we can generally deduce which CVEs have and have not been fixed. Some extensions to the secfixes reporting schema will be added to allow package maintainers to denote false positives.

In the near future, state changes will be reported to a security announcement list as the engine processes them.

Setting up

You should create a virtualenv in the usual way, then do pip3 install -r requirements.txt.

If you want to use a database other than sqlite, you will want to install the driver for that, for example pip3 install psycopg2.

Finally, you will want to write a config file: copy the example one and modify it to suit your needs.

You will need to then set these env variables to something useful:

• SECFIXES_TRACKER_CONFIG: path to the config file
• FLASK_APP: the name of the app, secfixes_tracker

Once done, initialize the database with flask init-db.

Build

Optionally, run make to build secfixes-cli. This requires go to be installed.

Tasks

Once the environment is configured, you can run various tasks:

flask run

Runs the webserver. This can also be done with gunicorn or something like that, but that's not covered here.

flask init-db

Initializes the database.

flask import-apkindex [repo]

Imports the configured repositories.

flask import-secfixes [repo]

Imports the configured secdb feeds.

flask import-nvd [feed-name]

Imports an NVD feed, such as 2021 or recent.

Once the yearly feeds have been imported, you only need to import the recent feed on a daily basis.

./secfixes-cli import-vulnrich

Imports CVE details from https://github.com/cisagov/vulnrichment.

flask update-states [repo]

Updates the various VulnerabilityState items based on the current contents of the secfixes, NVD and apkindex feeds. This should be run after the above import tasks on an hourly basis.

CPE rewriters

Rewriter rules are synced from Alpine infra/docker/secfixes-tracker. See config/README.md for file layout.

The Flask app uses Python CUSTOM_REWRITERS in secfixes_tracker/application.cfg (mirrored in config/prod.settings.py). Rules are lambda functions matched as cpe_vendor:source_pkgname or cpe_vendor:*.

PACKAGE_EXCLUSIONS in the same file excludes packages that accumulate false-positive CVEs (e.g. bridge).

Secfixes-cli

secfixes-cli uses expr-based rules in config/application.toml (mirrored in config/prod.application.toml). Rules are based on expr.

An example rule looks like:

[[rewriters]]
predicate = "target_sw == 'python'"
rewrite_rule = "product | lower() | replace('_', '-') | fmt('py3-%s')"

predicate determines whether the rule applies, while rewrite_rule determines how the cpe should be rewritten. An optional third option called field specifies what field of the CPE will be rewritten. If not provided, it defaults to product.

The following variables are available in the environment of the expressions:

• vendor
• product
• target_sw
• version

fmt is implemented with fmt.Sprintf, but takes only 2 arguments. The first argument is either a string, or a slice. This makes it possible to use it with pipes.

Cron

You'll want to run the import tasks, and then the update-states tasks. That's all that needs to be done.

E-mail

The e-mail stuff is being redesigned to fit better into how the tracking engine was implemented. Watch this space once the e-mail stuff is ready for setup instructions.

Caveats

At present, the database schema is unstable. You will need to rebuild your database when upgrading this software. Once we hit version 1.0, the database schema will be stable.